The U.S. Mint is circulating the first piece of currency with the likeness of an Asian American – a quarter coin that features Anna May Wong (1905-1961), the first Chinese-American motion picture star. Wong was honored for her Hollywood fame, and her struggle against its Asian stereotypes.
“The fifth coin in our American Women Quarters Program honors Anna May Wong, a courageous advocate who championed for increased representation and more multi-dimensional roles for Asian-American actors,” said Mint Director Ventris C. Gibson. “This quarter is designed to reflect the breadth and depth of accomplishments by Anna May Wong, who overcame challenges and obstacles she faced during her lifetime.”
Wong’s career was a contradiction. She starred in featured roles in a time of widespread anti-Asian xenophobia, when many Americans feared a Chinese Yellow Peril. Chinese laborers were barred from entering the United States. Yet many Americans were fascinated by the exotica of Orientalism.
Wong was Chinese American, born in 1905 in Los Angeles as Wong Liu Tsong. Her paternal grandfather came to America from a village near Toishan, China, following the discovery of gold in California. Her father operated a laundry, and the family lived on Figueroa Street near 1st Street and the old Chinatown.
Anna May Wong, as she re-named herself, aspired to life in another world – the fledgling make-believe of silent movies. When she was 14, she worked as an extra in the 1919 film about the Chinese Boxer Rebellion called The Red Lantern.
Quickly she became a leading lady. At 17, she starred as a Madame Butterfly-like Chinese girl in “The Toll of the Sea” (1922) — one of the first Technicolor movies. Two years later, a scantily clan Anna Mae Wong was featured as a slave in “The Thief of Bagdad” (1924), which starred one of Hollywood’s top leading men, Douglas Fairbanks.
It was the Roaring ‘20s, and soon the Great Depression. At a time when Chinese women in America were a rarity, Wong came to epitomize Chinese-American beauty, glamor and sophistication. Amid a wave of feminism that featured the Flapper, the new modern woman of the 20th Century, Wong, too, was bold, independent, outspoken and ambitious.
In the 1920s, Wong appeared in more than 30 films, never in the roles she truly wanted.
She was among the first to protest Hollywood’s racist depictions of Chinese and other minority American characters. Wong was typecast as an exotic Oriental, in roles as the villain, an enslaved person or maid. She was expected to perform in a “yellowface,” as whites imagined Chinese women to behave. Moreover, miscegenation laws barred interracial relations between Chinese and whites, even in movies. She expressed frustration that leading Asian roles went to “yellowface” white actors, and she got only supporting roles. In not one of her American movies did she film at on-screen kiss.
In the late 1920s, she left Hollywood for a time to work overseas in Germany ,France and England, gaining international notoriety for her films and cabaret shows.
She returned to Hollywood in 1931, starring in her first sound motion picture, Daughter of the Dragon. She got top billing for playing the daughter of Dr. Fu Manchu but was paid $6,000 — half as much as her co-star, the white actor Warren Oland, who played her father made up in “yellow face” to look Asian.
A year later, Anna May Wong appeared as a prostitute in the 1932 classic, Shanghai Express – the highest-grossing film of that year. The moody, black-and-white talking film starred Marlena Dietrich and her frequent collaborator, director Josef von Sternberg. It told the story of a group of mostly white train passengers held hostage by a warlord during the Chinese Civil War. Anna May Wong’s character, who is raped by the warlord, emerges as the hero after she kills him.
It was a rare opportunity for her to play a sympathetic character, and regarded as her most memorable role — the apex of her career.
During the early 1930s she sought her dream role, eying the lead in MGM’s 1937 production of “The Good Earth, an adatation of Pearl S. Bucks Nobel Prize-winning book about Chinese farmers. However, while Wong wanted the role of O-Lan, one of the farmers, she was instead offered the role of Lotus, a sex worker who becomes the concubine of O-Lan’s husband. She declined, refusing to be the sole Asian cast member – and an unsympathetic character at that – in a film in which all the lead roles were given to white actors.
“I was so tired of the parts I had to play,” Wong said in a 1933 interview, according to the Los Angeles Times. “Why is it that the screen Chinese is nearly always the villain of the piece, and so cruel a villain — murderous, treacherous, a snake in the grass. We are not like that.”
In 1936, she visited China for the first time, and faced criticism for being too American, too modern. Upon her return to the U.S., she made a string of B-movies in non-stereotypical rolls. But she would never appear again in a big hit movie. As her career slowed during World War II, she devoted herself to fundraising to help China’s war effort against Japan. After the war, she appeared in a few television appearances.
Ultimately, her career spanned motion pictures, television, and the theater. She appeared in more than 60 movies, including 40 silent films. She also appeared in productions on the London and New York stages. She was a big star, but the roles she wanted most had eluded her.
“As the first Chinese American film star in Hollywood, she faced constant discrimination, frequently being typecast and passed over for lead roles in favor of non-Asian actresses,” Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) said after the U.S. Mint featured Anna May Wong on the quarter. “She is remembered not only as a great actress, but also as an advocate for increased representation of Asian Americans in film and media.”
Wong died in 1961 at the age of 56.
She inspired many Chinese-American actors who followed her. But Asian Americans are still underrepresented in American films.
According to a 2021 survey by the University of Southern California, of 1,300 popular films from 2007 to 2019, only just over 3 percent of the films featured an Asian, Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander lead or co-lead. Asians and Pacific Islanders make up more than 6 percent of the U.S. population, according to 2020 Census figures.
